International Relations Scholars Research Articles

Perspective-Taking and Security Dilemma Thinking: Experimental Evidence from China and the United States

abstract: One of the central challenges in China-US relations is the risk of a security dilemma between China and the United States, as each side carries out actions for what it perceives to be defensively motivated reasons, failing to realize how they are perceived by the other side. Yet how susceptible to the psychological biases that undergird the security dilemma are the Chinese and American publics? Can these biases' deleterious effects be mitigated? The authors explore the microfoundations of the security dilemma, fielding parallel dyadic cross-national survey experiments in China and the United States. We find microlevel evidence consistent with the logic of the security dilemma in publics in both countries. We also find that international relations (ir) scholars have overstated the palliative effects of perspective-taking, which can backfire in the face of perceived threats to actors' identities and goals. The authors' findings have important implications for the study of public opinion in China-US relations and perspective-taking in ir.

Appraisal of Public Opinion in Foreign Policy Making: Nigeria and United States of America as a Focal Point

Public opinion plays an unprecedented role in foreign policy making in Africa as well as in other advanced and sophisticated nations in the international system. However, in the United States of America and Nigeria, empirical evidence shows that public opinion has little or no significant effects on foreign policy decision-making. Several reasons abound for this, some of these reasons are the unwillingness of the political elites to embrace transparency, accountability, and inclusive governance. The study therefore examines the views of scholars on the role of public opinion in foreign policy making in the United States of America and Nigeria. The secondary source of data collection was adopted, data include archival materials, periodical publications, books, and the internet. Most of these materials were sourced through an extensive use of specialized library facilities of the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA). The research is descriptive and analytical. The study recommends that the American and Nigerian governments should encourage public opinion in foreign policy making. The researcher also recommend that scholars of International Relations should focus in their research on the role of Government in allowing the input of the public in both domestic and international politics. Keywords: Public Opinion, Foreign Policy, policy, United States of America, Nigeria.

Degrowth, global asymmetries, and ecosocial justice: Decolonial perspectives from Latin America

Abstract Degrowth literature predominantly states that degrowth strategies are meant from and for the Global North. While economic mainstream discourse suggests that the Global South still has to grow in terms of achieving development, degrowth proponents expect a reduction of material and energy throughput in the Global North to make ecological and conceptual space for the Global South to find its own paths toward ecosocial transformation. Based on a Latin American post-development and post-extractivist perspective and drawing on dependency theory, this article suggests another approach: first, it argues that the growth imperative, which in the peripheral world translates into the imperative to develop, also causes harm in societies of the Global South. Throughout Latin America, in the last decades, economic growth has mainly been achieved through extractivism with negative impacts, which are now being pushed further by green growth strategies. Second, I explore some possibilities for a cross-fertilisation between degrowth and International Relations scholarship, calling into question the assumption that degrowth in high-income countries would automatically ‘make space’ for the Global South to engage in self-determined paths of ecosocial transformation, as long as the structures, institutions, and rules of global governance and trade which secure profoundly asymmetric, colonial relations are not challenged.

Expanding Eurocentric Narratives of International Relations through Conservative Cooperation

Since the mid-1990s, critical International Relations (IR) scholars have increasingly drawn on postcolonial studies to call for opening up IR. However, it has turned out to be a more challenging task than initially imagined. It requires insight into the reasons behind the differences between the forms of national IR and the implications of such variation for our understanding of the international. Such differences need inquiring into by treating those from outside North America and Western Europe as thinking actors and paying attention to their accounts of the international. Eurocentrism occurs when research is designed in a way that occludes the global theory by drawing a direct line from ancient Greece to Renaissance Europe to modern day ‘West’ with next-to-no sociological insight into ‘connected histories’ of societies. Over the years, methodological Eurocentrism has produced a particular narrative about Europe’s place in world history. Thus, Eurocentric narratives have allowed designing research by virtue of the persistence of concepts that have been informed by the very same narratives. The critical point being, the very concepts through which we make sense of world politics (such as state, development, sovereignty and security) have their limitations not only when transplanted to other parts of the world but also when studying ‘Europe’ itself.

Using Bourdieu's Habitus in International Relations

Abstract The concept of habitus is a centerpiece of Pierre Bourdieu's cultural sociology and is among the most popular conceptual imports into the Bourdieu-inspired “practice turn” in International Relations (IR). There have, however, been recurrent questions whether IR work using habitus and Bourdieu mainly “re-describe in different language” what scholars already know about world politics. This article argues that a more traditional use of habitus that pays attention to the production of habitus is key to advancing distinctly Bourdieusian and practice-based accounts of international politics. Drawing on a detailed survey of habitus scholarship in IR, the article shows how the practice turn takes a narrow view of social structure by bracketing social class, race, and gender; is preoccupied with the pedagogical labor of secondary socialization over primary socialization; and neglects the concrete embodied dimension of practice. Looking to Bourdieu's own work, this article calls for theoretically armed empirical attention to social structure, primary socialization, and embodiment. It articulates a specific strategy for this recovery: closer attention to the production of habitus by mapping the biographies of individuals and groups and relating these sedimented histories to agents’ practices and shared structures of experience.

Race and International Organizations

Abstract While International Relations scholarship has increasingly addressed questions of race, the literature on international organizations (IOs) has been slower to do so. In particular, it has neglected how race functions within IO workforces. Building on sociological theories of racialized organizations, we develop the concept of racialized IOs. Like domestic organizations, racialized IOs are characterized by enhanced or inhibited agency of racial groups, racialized distribution of resources, credentialing of whiteness, and decoupling of formal rules and informal practices along racial lines. However, there are also two important differences. First, since IOs rely on member states for resources, their secretariats need to accommodate powerful white-majority countries (macro-level pressures). Second, since IO workforces are diverse, their employees may bring a range of racial stereotypes that exist in their societies into their professional practice (micro-level pressures). Using the case of UN peacekeeping, we demonstrate how the four features of racialized organizations operate in light of these macro- and micro-level pressures. We show that locally hired peacekeeping staff face constraints on exercising agency; that non-white peacekeepers perform more dangerous jobs than their white counterparts; that whiteness serves as a proxy for desirable skills while non-white peacekeepers’ knowledge is devalued; and that peacekeepers from white-majority countries receive special treatment or deviate from UN-wide procedures.

Feeling for the Anthropocene: affective relations and ecological activism in the global South

Abstract How do emotions shape ecological activism in the global South? Despite growing interest in researching ecological activism in International Relations (IR), there hasn't been much work that draws insights from the global South due to the predominant focus on western societies. Against the backdrop of the recent ‘relational’, ‘emotional’ and ‘Anthropocene’ turns in IR scholarship, this article examines how emotions can contribute to ecological activism in the global South. The article seeks to move beyond the dominant rationalist technocratic fixes to the Anthropocene condition and conceptualize the ‘affective relations’ as a frame for situating and sustaining relations between humans and nature. It argues that the ‘international’ in IR is a relational sphere of society—and emotions act as the purveyor of those social relations. Empirically, this article examines historical insights from ecological activism in the Chipko (tree-hugging) movement in India. The article argues that feelings as the non-violent practice (in their hugging of trees, silent demonstrations, protest slogans, street plays, songs and performances) become sites of resistance in ecological activism in India's Chipko movement. Finally, the article explains how affective relations sustain humans, nature and the state.

Shifting sands: How change-point and community detection can enrich our understanding of international politics

When and how do international political arrangements change? International relations scholars have long examined the nature of shifts in international alliance and cooperation networks, often arguing that times of disruption in the international system are the most precarious for peace. In this research note, we rely on innovations in change-point and community detection methods to endogenously examine the timing and nature of shifts in country-to-country relationships through defense cooperative agreements. Using new methodical innovations from network science, we can see how countries move through different communities over time, changing the nature of polarity in the system. This empirical approach can help provide insights into determinants of peace, vulnerabilities in the international system, and potential aggressors in world politics.

Stories we live by: the rise of Historical IR and the move to concepts

Scholars of the humanities and social sciences are necessarily storytellers. Thus, crafting narratives is an inescapable feature of the practice of International Relations scholarship. We tell stories about the past to orient ourselves in the present and envision the future. Historical International Relations has greatly expanded the repertoire of available narrative elements. However, when we read the past through the prism of our present, we risk closing down opportunities for different ways of imagining both the present and the future. In this article, we acknowledge the advances made in HIR over the last decades but suggest that a closer engagement with conceptual history would enhance its potential even further, making it possible to explore how a wider space of experience can also widen our horizon of expectations.

Critical Annotations on Historical Documents: Methodological Possibilities for International Relations Research

This process note explicates the methodological intervention of maintaining fieldnotes on government documents and its significance for historically situated international relations (IR) research. For the most part, IR scholarship treats archival documents as the neutral preserve of the state, representing its coherent national interests. Building on discussions around critical methods within IR, I argue that there is a need to reflexively engage with the writing and curating practices of the state. This process note deploys the ethnographic hallmark of thick description within IR research through critical annotations on archival documents and other government publications on India’s eastern Himalayan borderlands between 1880 and 1965. These annotations encourage a granular reading of government documents and situate them within a larger context of their production, reception, archival memorialisation and subsequent access. I propose that critical annotations help us move beyond post-hoc analyses of foreign policy in terms of success and failure. Instead, in viewing IR theorising as ‘unfinished dictionaries of the international’, I argue that critical annotations challenge a unitary view of the state and facilitate a more nuanced analysis of foreign policymaking emphasising historical contingencies within which policies are articulated and enacted.

Communities of Practice in World Politics: Advancing a Research Agenda

Abstract This special forum focuses on international communities of practice (CoP) as a concept and an object of inquiry in International Relations (IR). The Introduction discusses the concept’s origins and how it has entered the field of IR. It addresses why and how CoPs matter to IR scholars by looking at how structure, agency, processes, institutions, and knowledge manifest themselves in communities. This special forum’s main contributions are: (1) capturing the political and economic effects of shared knowledge creation and diffusion through practices; (2) identifying the sources of knowledge production and learning, as well as the normative and political contestation within and between CoPs; (3) studying the social processes that originate at the boundaries between CoPs; (4) examining how people and processes generate, transform, and communicate knowledge; and (5) exploring how CoPs cultivate global governance’s norms, values, and practices from the bottom up. The Introduction also helps distinguish CoP from other relational concepts in IR such as networks, fields, regimes, and epistemic or security communities. It ends by way of situating the contributions to the special forum and outlining a research agenda on CoPs in world politics.

Crisis and Transformative Learning in Communities of Practice: Semi-Formal Learning in CSDP during COVID-19

Abstract This article analyzes learning in the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) by way of drawing on recent theoretical advancements on the concept of communities of practice (CoP) in international relations (IR). The article presents an analytical framework that distinguishes between reproductive and transformative learning in relation to levels of contestation in CoPs. To illustrate the framework’s analytical usefulness, the article analyzes the case of CSDP lessons learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis draws on data from a survey as well as interviews with EU officials, and it suggests that the combination of an external crisis and an institutional momentum to facilitate collective learning produced a context where CSDP practitioners demonstrated more willingness to engage in the formal process of recording lessons. A shared sense of urgency in collecting lessons from the pandemic and the unprecedented absence of informal sites for learning practices due to restrictions of physical meetings, meant that semi-formal learning practices could fill the void of informal interactions. This provided for a unique context for transformative learning in the CSDP that is highly relevant for IR scholars interested in the political effects of learning and contestation in international organizations and in CoPs more generally.

Understanding Turkish Foreign Policy Studies: A Bibliometric Analysis

Employing a rigorous bibliometric framework, this study undertakes a comprehensive exploration of scholarly inquiries into Turkish Foreign Policy (TFP) by utilizing an extensive dataset extracted from the reputable SCOPUS database. TFP publications in various languages were scrutinized over nearly a century, from 1939 to 2022, with bibliometric analysis methodically traversing titles, keywords, abstracts, word frequencies, references, authorships, citations, and geographic diffusion. To comprehensively unravel the scholarly landscape, we employed three bibliometric methodologies: descriptive statistics, network analysis, and textual analysis. The overarching goals included delineating the contours of the TFP scholarly community, charting the evolution of influential factors across temporal horizons, and gauging the extent of collaborative interactions among TFP researchers. Our findings reveal the absence of a cohesive TFP research community within the Turkish academic landscape, which unequivocally underscores the fragility of Turkish International Relations (IR) academia in terms of scientific collaboration, academic networking, and research productivity. Our findings distinctly underscore the fragmentary nature of the TFP research community in terms of thematic breadth and practical manifestations. The conspicuous dearth of cross-referencing among Turkish IR scholars, limited joint scientific ventures, and scholarly output collectively underpin inherent vulnerabilities and constraints within the TFP community.

A Matter of Journal Choice: A Conjoint Experiment on Submission Choices of Latin American IR Scholars

Abstract This article addresses the underrepresentation of Global South scholars in Global North journals. In order to explore this issue, we conducted a study on the submission decisions of Global South scholars, with a focus on International Relations (IR). We collected novel data on IR scholars based in Latin America and conducted a conjoint experiment on a sample of 446 scholars. Our study provides the first experimental evidence of journal submission choice in Political Science in the Global South. Our findings indicate that both journal attributes and individual characteristics impact the choice of journal, including factors such as language, editorial location, and acceptance rates. This research has important implications for the discipline and for journal editors in the Global North, as it provides valuable insights on how to promote diversity in academic publishing as well as the limits of such strategies.

The Diplomacy of Whataboutism and US Foreign Policy Attitudes

AbstractDoes whataboutism work in global affairs? When states face international criticism, they often respond with whataboutism: accusing their critics of similar faults. Despite its prevalence in policy discussions, whataboutism remains an understudied influence strategy. This study investigates how states use whataboutism to shape American public opinion across various international issues. We find, using survey experiments, that whataboutism mitigates the negative impacts of criticism by reducing public approval of US positions and backing for punitive actions. Whataboutist critiques referencing similar, recent misdeeds have more power to shape opinions. However, the identity of the whataboutist state does not significantly affect effectiveness. US counter-messaging often fails to diminish the effects of whataboutism. These results show that whataboutism can be a potent rhetorical tool in international relations and that it warrants greater attention from international relations scholars.

Gender dan Keselamatan: Sumbangan Maharani Cixi Dalam Dalam Reformasi China (1861-1908)

Research on gender and ancient female leadership, like that of Empress Dowager Cixi (1861–1908), is lacking in English and Malay. Most research only discussed Cixi’s general narrative. The majority of studies merely covered Cixi’s overarching story. Cixi was one of the women leaders who defied the patriarchal status quo to rule. Nevertheless, her contribution was overlooked due to the controversy surrounding her, which tarnished her reputation. Thus, through library research and content analysis methods, this article discusses Cixi’s contribution to the Qing dynasty while filling in the research gap of international relations scholarship by overlooking Cixi’s contributions, which fall under the scope of the missing women figures under the gender and international relation scholarship. The study shows that Cixi’s contribution could be traced through the reformation of political sectors, such as the development of modern military and defense sectors, economic sectors, and social sectors, such as women’s empowerment. Cixi successfully defied the gender barrier to become a leader; however, her contribution has been overlooked. It is time for her leadership to be recognised.

The Methodological Machinery of Wargaming: A Path toward Discovering Wargaming’s Epistemological Foundations

Abstract This paper proposes a comprehensive research program for determining the epistemological foundations of analytic wargaming. Wargaming has been used in military, government, and private sectors for decades, with tens of millions of dollars spent annually on it. In light of the changing strategic circumstances of the twenty-first century, it has only become more popular. However, the epistemological foundations of the method are poorly understood. Many professional wargamers contend that wargaming is an “art” and thus unable to be systemically evaluated. Recent work by a small coterie of international relations scholars has contended that wargaming can be reconciled with social science, typically by evaluating wargaming according to experimental standards. However, this solution strips wargames of most of their unique features and cannot explain why some of the most prominent wargames in history produced meaningful results. In this paper, I argue that in the attempt to better understand wargaming’s epistemology, scholars should begin by recognizing the prominent features of wargames and research each of these to determine if and how wargames produce rigorous knowledge. In making this argument, I identify five distinct “methodological machineries” of wargaming—the recurring processes through which wargames may produce knowledge—that distinguish wargaming from other social science methods: (i) they are representative, (ii) they feature consequential decisions made by human players, (iii) they are adjudicated, (iv) they are immersive, and (v) they are bespoke designs. I show how each of these machineries offers potential opportunities and dangers in the production of knowledge through the method of wargaming. In outlining these distinct features, I offer a clear and viable research program for epistemologists of wargaming.

Populist Foreign Policy: Mapping the Developing Research Program on Populism in International Relations

Abstract This article reviews one of the expanding research programs in international relations (IR): the study of populist foreign policy (PFP). Recent years have witnessed a significant proliferation of IR scholars researching the nexus between the global rise of populism and their foreign policies across different countries, regions, and sub-fields. However, scientific progress at such stage of this research program demands an in-depth “mapping” of its different ontological approaches. To this end, we identify and explore five “schools” of PFP that have been consolidated in the last decade, while highlighting their accomplishments in understanding the distinctive populist elements in foreign policy and their possibilities of analyzing local and external conditions under which PFP impacts global politics. We also set the stage for future contributions on the drivers, patterns, and effects of PFP, under the assumption that the populist phenomenon and its transnational dimensions will continue to affect IR prospects for a long time to come.

A true crime story: The role of space, time, and identity in narrating criminal authority

Abstract This article presents a theoretical and methodological argument for employing a narrative-based approach to explore criminal organisations’ (COs) claims to political authority, accompanied by an empirical example. International Relations scholarship is increasingly interested in the role narratives play in political meaning-making processes, with violent non-state actors (VNSAs) beginning to occupy a central space in such investigations. This work has contributed important insights into how VNSAs, such as terrorists and insurgents, mobilise narratives to challenge state authority. However, this literature still needs to take stock of groups that do not directly challenge the state but rather live within it. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary theory and using the Sicilian Mafia as a case study, I show that COs exercise and construct their narratives of political authority by reappropriating the state’s key constitutive narratives of space, time, and identity. By reflecting the same form of (statist) political imagination via alternative spatial, temporal, and identity configurations, these groups simultaneously reject and reproduce modern articulations of political authority in their spatio-temporal and identity dimensions.

Does Militarization Hinder Female Labor Income Share?

Abstract This study addresses the underexplored dimension of the relationship between military expenditures and gender inequality, drawing upon the insights of feminist security and international relations scholars. The influence of militarization on gender inequality is profound, manifesting itself significantly in both conflict and peacetime situations. The destruction of essential infrastructure further restricts women’s access to vital resources. In peacetime, the convergence of militarization and patriarchy reinforces women’s secondary roles in society, while higher military expenditures can divert resources from social spending, disproportionately affecting women and children reliant on public services. Despite extensive theoretical discussions, empirical studies on this nexus are limited. This paper contributes by presenting original evidence using a comprehensive dataset spanning 1991–2019, examining the Female Labor Income Share across over 100 countries. Findings reveal that militarization correlates with reduced the Female Labor Income Share, underscoring the urgency of addressing this critical linkage between militarization and gender inequality.